Freedom writers
#Freedom writers movie#
The movie also follows the narrator student Eva Benitez who witnesses her boyfriend's drive-by shooting of her classmate and must testify.
Administrator Margaret Campbell (Imelda Staunton) refuses to give her proper books. Her husband Scott Casey (Patrick Dempsey) slowly stops being supportive. Her father Steve Gruwell (Scott Glenn) is disappointed in her wasting her effort. She is given the at-risk kids who segregate themselves into racial cliques. The school was academically excellent until it voluntarily integrated. Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank) is a rookie wide-eyed idealistic English teacher in Woodrow Wilson high school. Reviewed by SnoopyStyle 6 / 10 familiar formula I wish she'd been my teacher and given me The Diary of Anne Frank to read. And the meeting of Swank's class with Holocaust survivors was tender and touching indeed. What was for me the best was having those kids read about the troubles of another young person who they could relate to. She gets good support from Patrick Dempsey as the husband who becomes estranged from her with her single minded devotion to her kids and from Scott Glenn as her father. I'd expect nothing less than the best from a two time Oscar winner and Ms. Those are the folks the educational system ought to treasure. Some of them were just time servers and not terribly inspirational. I had a few good teachers like Hilary Swank in my youth.
The writing came when she had them keep diaries that could be read on a volunteer basis. And that vision showed that as young people they had far more in common than the race and ethnicity that divided them. The real miracle that was wrought in Freedom Writers is that Swank gave these kids a vision of the wider world. And that's what Hilary Swank is in Long Beach High School a newly racially mixed school where all the kids seem to be balkanized. If you noticed the common thread running through all the films mentioned and this one is that it seems to take a neophyte teacher to shake up the system and try something new. This film and Hilary Swank's lead performance in it have an honored place among those previously mentioned. Reviewed by bkoganbing 9 / 10 The Wider Worldįilms about our educational system have been moneymakers from The Blackboard Jungle, to Up the Down Staircase, to Stand and Deliver and now Freedom Writers. Erin also finds that her teaching job is placing a strain on her marriage to Scott Casey, a man who seems to have lost his own idealistic way in life. As Erin tries harder and harder to have resources provided to teach properly (which often results in her needing to pay for them herself through working second and third jobs), she seems to face greater resistance, especially from her colleagues, such as Margaret Campbell, her section head, who lives by regulations and sees such resources as a waste, and Brian Gelford, who will protect his "priviledged" position of teaching the senior honors classes at all cost.
And it isn't until she provides an assignment of writing a daily journal - which will be not graded, and will remain unread by her unless they so choose - that the students begin to open up to her. It isn't until Erin holds an unsanctioned discussion about a recent drive-by shooting death that she fully begins to understand what she's up against. The only person the students hate more is Ms. The Latinos hate the Cambodians who hate the blacks and so on. Many are in gangs and almost all know somebody that has been killed by gang violence. Despite choosing the school on purpose because of its integration program, Erin is unprepared for the nature of her classroom, whose students live by generations of strict moral codes of protecting their own at all cost. For many of the existing teachers, the integration has ruined the school, whose previously stellar academic standing has been replaced with many students who will be lucky to graduate or even be literate. Idealistic Erin Gruwell is just starting her first teaching job, that as freshman and sophomore English teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School, which, two years earlier, implemented a voluntary integration program.